Summary
We hear news reports cutting in and out that suggest we are in a dystopia, in which the whole earth is being devastated by global warming. We see a train whiz by as a supertitle tells us, "the precious few who boarded the rattling ark are humanity's last survivors."
Inside the train, two men with guns and helmets enter a car on the train as a supertitle reads, "17 Years Later A.D. 2031." One of the troopers has a group of dirt-caked passengers sit down in rows on the train. One of the passengers, Curtis Everett, does not sit down upon the trooper's orders, and his friend, Edgar whispers for him to do so. The trooper raises his gun, and Curtis sits. As he sits down, Curtis tells Edgar that he was counting doors behind the troopers. Curtis is planning to sneak through the train, in spite of Edgar's insistence that he is crazy.
The trooper asks if there are any experienced violinists on the train and someone comes forward. Edgar complains to Curtis that the wealthy people in the front cars of the train get to eat steak dinners and listen to string quartets while they eat. Edgar and Curtis then take food—small black gelatinous objects— from a cart. Meanwhile, an older man and his wife volunteer to go play the violin, saying they were in the Boston Symphony Orchestra and that he was first chair. "Show me your hands," says the trooper, and the husband and wife do. The trooper just wants the man to come with him, even though the man insists that his wife plays even better than he does. "They just need one person," says the trooper, and the man refuses, but as he does, the guard comes rushing towards them and knocks the wife to the ground with the bottom of his gun.
He stomps on the woman's hand and everyone in the car sits on the ground. Curtis tells Edgar that he is going to break out soon. The trooper leads the violinist away as he calls back to Doris, his wife. We see Doris eating her food, her face now bloodied. Edgar asks Curtis what steak tastes like, and Curtis insists that it's better to forget. Curtis visits a woman, Tanya, and her son, Timmy, and tries to trade Timmy for a "protein block," the food they are eating. Tanya encourages Timmy to trade, but the boy runs away and hides. Edgar chases Timmy, who climbs into different bunks on the train.
Curtis tries to reason with Timmy, asking him what he will trade his protein block for. When Timmy says he wants "the ball," Curtis hesitates then finally agrees. Timmy hands him the protein block, as Tanya asks Curtis if it is time for him to break out yet. "Not yet," he says.
Curtis cuts up the protein block that Timmy gave him and finds a small capsule with a message in it, which he hands to an older gentleman, Gilliam. The message is the name of a security expert in the prison section of the train who Curtis hopes to go find. Edgar is doubtful about the plan, but Curtis dismisses him. With Gilliam's help, Curtis maps out his escape plan, as Gilliam says, "Our fate depends on this." Curtis says, "If we get him to cooperate with us, he can get us to the front of the train." Gilliam questions whether it will work, but Curtis insists, "we control the engine, we control the world. Without that we have nothing." Curtis' plan involves killing Wilford, the evil mastermind at the front of the train, a plan which shocks Gilliam.
Curtis thinks that Gilliam should run the train rather than Wilford, but Gilliam dismisses this notion, saying, "My day was decades ago." Later, Curtis talks about his escape with Edgar as they lie in their bunks. Edgar tells Curtis that one day Gilliam will die and Curtis will have to take over, even though Curtis insists he's not a leader. "I think you'd be pretty good if you asked me," says Edgar. Curtis asks Edgar if he can remember his mother, and Edgar tells him that the memory isn't clear.
Suddenly the troops come into the car for an impromptu inspection. They assemble all of the children on the car and take them away without their parents. A woman in a yellow jacket comes in and examines them, then measures one with a tape measurer. Suddenly, the woman comes over to Tanya and uses the tape measurer to peek under her skirt to see if she's hiding a child there. As the woman walks away, Timmy pops out from under Tanya's skirt and makes a run for it as Tanya starts screaming, as the guards start beating her up. One of the guards grabs Timmy and hands him over to the woman in the yellow jacket, who leads him away along with the other little boy they measured.
The scene shifts and we see the father of the other little boy who was taken away, as guards put a clock around his neck. They open a portal to the outside and put the man's hand through it. He screams at the feeling of the brutal subzero temperatures outside.
A woman, Mason, enters the back car of the train and makes a seven-minute-long speech scolding the passengers for the disorder on the car. She holds up a size 10 shoe to represent the chaos that has taken place on the train. She tells the passengers that order is the only thing protecting the passengers on the train from the brutal and bitter cold outside world. Putting the shoe on the head of the man whose arm is outside the train, she says, "I am a hat, you are a shoe. I belong on the head, you belong on the foot." She then discusses the sanctity of the "sacred engine," and how everything on the train must subscribe to a particular order.
Mason then calls Wilford on a phone, and tries to get him to speak to the car, but it is just static. Two men pull the man's arm out of the hole. It is completely frozen, and one of the guards uses a giant hammer to smash it, as the man screams in pain. Gilliam stands in the back and begins walking towards the front of the car, catching Mason's eye. Gilliam walks towards the man whose arm has just been smashed and tells Mason that he wants her to deliver a message to Wilford that the two of them need to talk. "You can talk to me!" says Mason cheerfully, but Gilliam walks away muttering to himself.
One night, Curtis looks at the guards and whispers to Gilliam that their guns don't have bullets, remembering that Mason called them "useless guns" during her visit to the car. Curtis is sure that the guards have used up all the bullets, but Gilliam is worried that Curtis is wrong. A man in the car does charcoal drawings of revolution, as a group of passengers work. He brings a drawing to Andrew, the man whose arm was smashed. The drawing is of Andrew's son, and he apologizes that it's not his best work. Tanya asks for a drawing of Timmy, and climbs down. The artist gives her a picture of Timmy and she smiles at the image of her little boy.
Analysis
The film sets the viewer down in the not-so-distant future, when global warming has overtaken the earth and the few remaining human beings must forge an existence on a train, also known as an "ark," hurtling across the landscape. This dystopian setting is as awful as anyone could imagine, with civilians packed into train cars and treated like animals, held at gunpoint by icy soldiers if they do not comply, and forced to labor their days away. The train is a metaphor for society itself, if a much more oppressive one, in which the masses are under tight watch and oppressed by the powerful arm of government.
In the midst of this bleak atmosphere is the brave and hopeful revolutionary, Curtis Everett. When we first meet Curtis, he is counting doors and planning to make his way through the train in order to stage a revolution against the powers that be. Thus, while the film immediately presents us with a bleak and hopeless dystopian universe, we are also quickly introduced to a capable and determined protagonist, a revolutionary who is set on changing his circumstance and breaking out of the life of subjugation in which he finds himself.
The structure of the train mirrors that of a stratified class system. While the poorer citizens on the train live in the back of it, covered in filth, the richer passengers live up front and eat "steak dinners and listen to string quartets," according to Edgar. In this way, the structure of a hierarchical class system, one in which the wealthy live in luxury while the poor struggle to get by, is made literal in the structure of the train: rich in front, poor in back. In order to understand the system and topple this hierarchy, Curtis must make his way from the back of the train to the front; hence his researching how the system of doors works.
As horrible and nefarious as the oppressive authorities on the train may be, there is also an uncanny absurdity to their identities as well. This is embodied most of all by Mason, the stuttering woman in the grandma glasses and fur coat who uses a shoe as a metaphor for chaos on the train. The privileged classes on the train are protecting by the brute force of the guards who do not shy away from violence, but the talking heads of the operation are ridiculous, almost comic in their fascistic rhetoric and bumbling authority.
The aesthetic of the movie reflects the drab and bleak prospects of the characters and the horrible quality of life suffered by those in the last car of the train. The color palette is all dark greens, grays, and blacks, and these tones lend a sense of drudgery to all proceedings. Characters wear raggedy clothes, all caked in dirt. Meanwhile, the visitors from the other cars wear clothes that reflect a higher quality of life, such as Mason's fur coat, or the child wrangler's bright yellow jacket. There are notable visual contrasts between the peasants of the last car and those who live elsewhere.
